Next step: developing for OS X

It’s been a while since I’ve worked on my game programming hobby, but I have not given up! This is just a hiatus while I do actual paying work.

That beginning game programming book really served well for its purpose. Now my next goal is to make a copy of an existing game from scratch. Is there any question what game I will make? Tetris, of course. It is, by all means, the game I have personally spent the most time with. I have an old Game Boy with one game: Tetris (my inheritance from my Dad, sitting next to my desk right now). Tetris is on my phone. Tetris rules.

So the real question was what platform I would target, which I grappled with for a while. That’s a loaded question, because it means starting off on a path learning a set of tools such as graphics libraries. It, at least *seemed* like a big commitment. I finally settled on developing games for OS X, mainly because that is the platform I use most nowadays. There is a pretty big initial learning curve since I have never developed for the Mac before. I will be using Cocoa, Objective C, and OpenGL, all new to me. Plus, I assume I will be using all of the OS X development tools, such as XCode, also new to me. It’s all doable, but a little daunting in toto.

There are a few other ways I could have gone about targeting OS X, such as with Flash, Java, or SDL. None of those quite felt right, though. I feel (and this is all very intuitive, gut-based, no deep analysis involved… hey, this is a hobby after all… it’s all about doing what I find fun and interesting) like doing it the true OS X way will really be the way to make an OS X game. SDL is still kinda interesting to me, so I may dive into that at some point, too.

Since I have a big tools learning curve, it will probably be a while before I actually get anything done on the actual game.